Can Pills Help Me Lose Weight? The Truth About Fat-Burners

I already explained in another post that there is no magic weight loss pill.  There isn't a substitute for good, clean eating and exercise.  That being said, there are many, many products on the market that claim to help with fat loss.  Are they all lying, or is there some truth to their claims?

Fat Blockers 
Fat blockers are one of the ways fat burning supplements claim to rid the body of fat. The supplements are usually made from a shellfish derivative called chitosan. Chitosan enters the body, binds to the fat in the food a person has eaten, and keeps it from being absorbed by the body. There are two downsides to this method. First, fat blockers can also prevent the body from absorbing nutrients it needs. Second, that bound fat still needs to leave the body, which it often does in the form of stomach pain and diarrhea.  (source:  FitDay.com)

Appetite Suppression
Appetite is suppressed by manipulating the body’s chemicals and hormones to trick the brain into feeling full. Suppressants that take away general hunger are called noradrenergic drugs. These drugs are often cousins of amphetamines, and work by triggering fight-or-flight hormones than interrupt the body’s hunger signals to the brain. The other class of suppressants, which are designed to make you feel fuller quicker, work by manipulating serotonin reuptake. The idea is to trigger a sense of well-being that distracts you from the need to eat more. Negative side affects of these drugs vary from a nervous feeling to heart attacks. They also tend to lose their effectiveness as more weight is lost.  (source:  FitDay.com)

Increased Metabolism
Artificially increasing the human body’s metabolism, or the speed in which it breaks down and uses nutrients, is a long established method of weight loss. One of the most common drugs used to do this is caffeine. When the body is stimulated by caffeine, it releases hormones into the bloodstream to cue a quickening of metabolism. These hormones are not in infinite supply, and constant stimulation can change the body’s ability to regulate itself and its weight. Overuse of metabolism stimulants can also have the opposite of the desired effect, causing the metabolism to slow down in self-preservation.  This is one of the reasons caffeine based fat burners do not maintain effectiveness over a long period of time.  (source:  FitDay.com)

Thermogenesis
When you exercise, you naturally increase your body's core temperature, thus boosting your metabolism naturally.  Thermogenic fat burners cause your body temperature to increase in a similar fashion, whether or not you are exercising.  WebMD considers just about every herbal weight loss supplement to be a thermogenic fat burner.  (source:  weighttraining.com)

Food-based Nutrients
According to Women's Health Magazine, specific vitamins and nutrients can actually help to flip an internal switch that signals cells throughout your body to burn more calories, wasting many of those calories as heat. Without these important nutrients, the opposite happens. 

1. Vitamin D - Study after study shows that vitamin D helps to ensure body cells listen and respond to insulin, a hormone secreted from your pancreas. One of its jobs is to help glucose get into body cells, which burn glucose for energy. How well insulin pushes glucose into cells is called "insulin sensitivity." The more sensitive your cells are to insulin, the better. The less sensitive they are to insulin, the more likely the calories you eat will end up in your fat cells.  When levels of D are low, levels of parathyroid hormone (PTH) rise. Higher than normal levels of PTH trigger a series of reactions that eventually lead to fat cells converting sugar into fat and hoarding fat rather than releasing it to be burned, explains Michael B. Zemel, PhD, director of the Nutrition Institute at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  A lack of vitamin D may also interfere with leptin, a hormone that signals your brain to stop eating. Your body doesn't know when it's full, so you continue to eat.
2. Calcium - Calcium is a mineral that works in tandem with D to help you shed fat. Calcium is stored in fat cells, and researchers think that the more calcium a fat cell has, the more fat that cell will release to be burned. Calcium also promotes weight loss by binding to fat in your GI tract, preventing some of it from getting absorbed into your bloodstream. 
3. Protein - In addition to keeping hunger in check, eating protein at every meal helps to keep body composition--the amount of fat relative to muscle--in better proportion. Along with calcium and D, protein helps you to preserve muscle mass as you drop pounds. A recent study out of the University of Illinois found that women who consumed protein twice daily lost 3.9 percent more weight than women who consumed less of it on a diet. They not only lost more weight, they also got stronger as they did so, with their thigh muscles alone ending up with 5.8 percent more protein at the end of the diet than before. 
4. Omega-3 Fatty Acids - omega-3s enable weight loss by switching on enzymes that trigger fat-burning in cells. They also help to boost mood, which may help reduce emotional eating. And omega 3s might improve leptin signaling in the brain, causing the brain to turn up fat burning and turn down appetite. Fatty fish like salmon (which are also high in vitamin D) are one of the richest sources of this fat. Other foods, such as some nuts and seeds, contain a type of fat that can be converted into omega-3s after ingestion.
5. Monounsaturated Fatty Acids (MUFAs) - One Danish study of 26 men and women found that a diet that included 20 percent of its calories from MUFAs, a type of fat found in olive oil, nuts, seeds, avocados, peanut butter, and chocolate, improved 24-hour calorie burning by 0.1 percent and fat burning by 0.04 percent after 6 months. Other research shows that MUFAs zero in on belly fat. Specific foods that are high in MUFAs--especially peanuts, tree nuts, and olive oil--have been shown to keep blood sugar steady and reduce appetite, too. 
6. Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) - CLAs are potent fat burners that are found, along with D and calcium, in dairy products. They are fatty acids that are created when bacteria ferments the food in the first part of the stomach of cows, sheep, and other ruminant animals. The CLA that is created through fermentation then makes its way into the meat and milk of these animals.  When we consume these foods, the CLA helps blood glucose enter body cells, so CLA can be burned for energy and not stored as fat. CLA also helps to promote fat burning, especially in muscles, where the bulk of our calorie burning takes place. 
7. Polyphenols - Polyphenols are the antioxidants that give green tea its health-and metabolism-boosting punch. Research shows they boost resting metabolic rate by up to a whopping 17 percent, helping the body to burn more fat. One recent study done on rats found that EGCG, the polyphenol in green tea, blocked weight gain and prevented metabolic syndrome when rats were fed a high-fat diet. You can actually feel this effect after you drink the tea. Your body will literally heat up as your cells waste calories as heat. Green tea is a great winter elixir for that reason. Drink a cup whenever you feel chilled and are tempted to eat even though you are not really that hungry. The tea will warm and soothe you, reducing hunger and cravings. 

Do They Work?
The good news is that yes, many products and food-based nutrients can help with fat loss.  The bad news is, you need to be eating a healthy, balanced diet and exercising for them to help.  You can't just sit around eating pizza in front of the TV, pop a few pills and expect to see any results.  If you're already committed to eating right and exercising, then some supplements can help you lose weight more effectively.  

Are They Safe?
This is probably a better question.  You really need to do your own homework on both the product and the manufacturer to tell for sure.  Children, the elderly, persons with heart and kidney conditions and nursing or pregnant women should avoid taking any type of supplement that can radically increase metabolism.  Thermogenic fat burners definitely fall into this category.  Before taking a thermogenic fat burner, you should be certain that you are in a good state of health. Chest pains, shortness of breath and signs of dehydration should be reported to your primary health practitioner immediately, even if you have stopped taking the thermogenic fat burner.  (source:  weighttraining.com) 

Fat burning supplements can have some small effects on weight loss. Some authorities claim that these types of supplements can safely be used in small amounts, and they can be effective at jump-starting weight loss. But the means the drugs employ to do so involve manipulating the body’s natural processes, sometimes to a severe degree. Side effects are to be expected, and the truth is those side affects range from uncomfortable to fatal.  Anyone with any sort of pre-existing heart, hormonal or digestive condition should seriously consider avoiding fat burning supplements. For other people, it remains a personal choice, but one that should be made with a certain degree of wariness.  (source:  FitDay.com)  

Bottom line
For long-term, healthy weight loss, eating the right kinds of foods and nutrients like those I mentioned above are the best course.  And regular exercise.  You don't want to be one of the people who take the next magic pill only to find out years later that it's been proven to do heart damage, for example.

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